Good Mooooorning Vietnam!

Ho Chi Minh (Siagon) is a crazy, bustling, racing machine with 11 million inhabitants and 7 million motorbikes (that’s a pretty serious bike to person ratio) and we loved it! 

We spent 4 days here-two mainly trying to sort out our insurance claim and contact the Cambodian police (in vain) and another two being touristy and wondering around the streets soaking it all up, eating scrummy food and drinking ridiculously cheap beer. We visited the War Remnants museum (harrowing), the Cu Chi tunnels (muddy), the Reunification Palace (interesting), the zoo (by mistake), some random pagoda that we were recommended, but took us a decade to find due to our epic map-reading skills (although our detour did lead us to our first Street-Pho experience which was devine) and the pagoda was actually pretty crap (they had a giant turtle as a pet and so little water in the fish pond that the fish had to swim sideways), and did a tour of the Electronic Shops of Siagon in the pursuit of an external hard drive.

View from the rooftop bar 

The Cu Chi Tunnels (that's not me)

Entrance to one of the tunnels (that is me)

My conclusion from our recent Historical tourism activities?..War is a big fat pile of bullshit. There, isn't that profound.

Walking the streets of Siagon is an experience in itself-there’s no point in waiting for a gap in the traffic, so you just have to take a deep breath and walk. We were told before we arrived to “Act like a stone in a stream…walk slowly and predictably and the traffic will flow around you!” It’s absolutely true-our tactic is to grab hold of each other, do a little 3-2-1 count-down and then step out and just walk….you get this amazing rush of adrenaline and when you reach the other side you feel like whooping and applauding yourself for being alive! It’s actually pretty fun, and after a crappy few days with all of the camera business, a few life-threatening street-crosses was weirdly what all we needed to snap us out of our We’ve-just-been-robbed grump.

Yes, they even drive on the pavement when they can't be arsed to queue....

Yes, even the police!!

Our only complaint….Siagon is flipping rainy (it literally rained all day on one of the days and on one afternoon the entire street flooded knee-deep!), and while I don’t mind a bit of rain (especially when I have my trusty poncho), the bit that bugs me is that the whole bloody city is covered in shiny floor tiles. Who the hell thought floor tiles would be a good idea in a city with a monsoon season?! So in my must-wear-flipflops-at-all-costs defiance, I spent the entire time in Siagon slipping around like Bambi on ice. Joy.